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A "raw, tensely plotted, profound high-wire act of a book" (Téa Obreht) on the intricacies of marriage, class, and race, and just how far one man will go to protect his family—and himself.
Sharif is a good person. He knows that he is good because he's aware of the privilege that he holds as a white man. He knows he is good because he chose to be a social worker at a nonprofit in Brooklyn, scraping by in New York City. And he knows he is good because his wife, Adjoua, a progressive Black novelist, has always said so.
But Sharif's goodness doesn't protect him and Adjoua against bad luck. In an emergency, when they must find a new home for their beloved, unruly, giant dog before the imminent birth of their immunocompromised daughter, a desperate Sharif leaves Judy in the care of Emmanuel, an undocumented Haitian immigrant Sharif met through his social services nonprofit.
When Emmanuel agrees to take the dog, it is only a momentary relief. What begins as a dispute between the young couple and Emmanuel's teenage son soon draws both families into a maelstrom of unpredictable conflict. As tempers flare into a public uproar, escalating to social media and taken up by law enforcement, the cracks in Sharif and Adjoua's marriage are exposed and they're forced to question everything they thought about race, empathy, and if Sharif was ever good in the first place. Immersive and propulsive, The Uproar is the book we need to understand the moment we live in now.
"A white New York City social worker confronts the limits of his altruism in this tense offering from Dimechkie...Dimechkie's morality tale asks tough questions about the role of self-interest in conflicts fueled by class and race divisions. It's sure to start conversations." —Publishers Weekly
"What happens when everything you believe about yourself is challenged by a series of events seemingly out of your control?...There is so much stress and discomfort in this book, which is also its strength, making the reader complicit in assumptions before blowing them out of the water. It would make a great book discussion book." ―Booklist
"Karim Dimechkie's unbearably tense (yet frequently very funny) second novel is the story of a white Brooklyn social worker—a good man, deeply invested in the idea of his own goodness—and the incident that blows his life apart...A brilliant, shapeshifting, deeply insightful examination of race and class, marriage and modern masculinity." ―Lit Hub
"Tense, immersive, and provocative. The Uproar is at once a psychological drama and a bracing look at class, race, power, and marriage. Once you start reading, you won't want to stop for breath until the end." ―Flynn Berry, author of Northern Spy
"The Uproar is at times hilarious, wise, insightful, and brave. It is at all times a pleasure." ―Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated
This information about The Uproar was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Karim Dimechkie's first novel, Lifted by the Great Nothing (Bloomsbury), was praised by NPR, the PEN/Hemingway Foundation, and Oprah.com. Karim was a Fellow of the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin, and has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony, The Anderson Center for the Arts, and the UCROSS Foundation. His writing can be found in the New York Times, The Saint Ann's Review, and Empirical Magazine's Best of Anthology. Like the protagonist of The Uproar, Karim spent over five years working in New York City's social services in Flatbush, Brooklyn while writing and acting as an MFA Thesis Advisor at Columbia University. He now lives between London and New York with his wife and son.
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